Syria protests: Evidence that government forces killed protesters

Syrian attempts to cover up the mass killings of protesters were exposed as
film footage emerged to provide the first glimpse of the retribution taken
against those who had dared to stand up to the country's Baathist regime.

Men carry a wounded person after gunshots were fired on a crowd outside a building used by military intelligence in SanameinPhoto: EPA

Ever since the first stirrings of unrest materialised more than a month ago, Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has sought to disguise both the unprecedented challenge to his authority and his violent efforts to suppress it.

But even thoughSyriahas effectively been sealed off from the outside world, Mr Assad, like so many of his fellow Arab dictators, has been unable to counter the power of technology.

Using nothing more than their mobile telephones, protesters braved live rounds to film the carnage unleashed on the southern city of Deraa for a second time on Friday.

Just two days before, reports from the city, which sits on Syria's border with Jordan, suggested that as many as 100 people had been shot dead by government security forces.

But its inhabitants refused to yield. One clip, shot on Friday, shows unarmed protesters gathering peacefully on a dusty city street when suddenly the calm is shattered by a barrage of machine gunfire so intense the individual rounds are indistinguishable for each other.

In panic, the protesters, children among them, seek whatever shelter they can find, darting behind walls and parked cars or ducking into shop doorways as the relentless cacophony continues.

Groups of men rush past, carrying the dead and the wounded. Blood drips onto the street. The camera hovers over the corpses of three men, lying in a puddle.

No-one knows exactly how many people were killed in the second massacre of Deraa, though some residents spoke of at least 25 fatalities, with hundreds more wounded.

There were deaths, too, in surrounding towns and villages whose people had attempted to march on the city to express their solidarity. A second video, shot in the town of Sanamayn, 40 miles north of Daraa, showed the bodies of seven men, some of them bearing horrific gunshot wounds, lain out across the floor of a building.

Residents in the town said at least 20 were killed on Friday.

Yet even after such a bloodbath, there was little evidence that Mr Assad had succeeded in preventing his country from following the trajectory of uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world that have seen equally hated leaders toppled or severely weakened.

Yesterday, thousands returned to the streets of Daraa, while in the nearby town of Tafas, angry crowds burned down the headquarters of the local Ba'ath party, which has ruled Syria since 1963, and set a police station alight.

The previous day, towns and cities across Syria that had either been quiet previously or had been successfully pacified, had also erupted in protest.

The demonstrations might have been smaller, but the response was equally brutish, with deaths reported in the city of Homs, President Assad's birthplace of Latakia and even in the capital Damascus itself.

Yet even as the president faced the prospect of a localised crisis turning into a countrywide revolt, his government insisted that nothing was amiss and resorted instead to the kind of propaganda perfected by Libya's leader, Moammar Gaddafi, in recent weeks.

Mr Assad's ministers claimed that the trouble was little more than a minor outbreak of violence, initiated by Islamist terrorists who had infiltrated the country from Jordan and concocted by the United States and its allies in al Qaeda.

"There is a totally peaceful climate in the Syrian towns and the terrorists have been arrested," Mohsen Bilal, the information minister, said.

State media went one step further, claiming that the rallies in Daraa had in fact been called to express their love of the president.

"Spontaneous popular rallies chanted national slogans highly lauding President Assad's generous decrees and decisions, pledging their loyalty to his excellency and their unity under his leadership in the face of the conspiracy against Syria," the SANA news agency reported.

It even purported to quote Sheikh Ahmed al-Sayasna, the imam of the al-Omari mosque where many protesters were killed on Wednesday, as saying that the "rallies were a message of love and gratitude by the citizens of Daraa to his excellency President Assad."

Yet Mr Sayasna told western reporters a different story, saying that at least 20 protesters were shot dead on Friday in an unprovoked attack by state forces.

The magnitude of the protests in Syria may not yet be on a sufficient scale to spell Mr Assad's imminent demise, but the momentum appears to be with the protesters.

One Israeli official who follows Syria yesterday said he believed the country had "reached a point of no return".

Many western governments will be hoping so in the belief that Mr Assad's overthrow would substantially weaken Iran, which has used its alliance with Syria to bolster its authority in the Middle East and has used the country as a conduit to supply weapons to Hizbollah and Hamas.

In the past few days, Syrian protesters have been heard chanting: "No to Iran! No to Hizbollah!" That Mr Assad is facing so stern a test is the result of one major misstep.

Even as other autocrats in the region were toppled, Syria had seemed insulated from the unrest plaguing the Middle East, its people too cowed to mount a serious challenge against one of the world's most repressive regimes.

In the back of many people's minds were the memories of what had happened to an earlier generation that had challenged the Assad dynasty. In 1982, the president's late father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, put down a revolt in the city of Hama by killing an estimated 20,000 people.

Two months ago, inspired by the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, a group of online activists called for protests in Damascus. No-one turned up. A second attempt last month drew just dozens, who were easily dispersed by riot police.

But then, a week ago, the authorities sparked the fury of the people of Daraa by arresting a group of school boys who had scrawled an anti-government slogan on a wall.

And in outrage at the treatment of the people of Daraa, other parts of Syria rose up.

Mr Assad may not be finished yet. He may not be finished at all. Although he is a member of the Allawite sect of Shia Islam, a minority that constitutes just 12 per cent of a population dominated by Sunnis, he can count on the allegiance of the senior echelons of the army -- something the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia could not.

Like the president, the army's officer corps is overwhelmingly Allawite, and has too much to lose by allowing a revolution. The Sunni business elite also backs the president.

But crucially, one of the key props of the regime, fear of the Assad name, has been broken.

Even more potently, there have also been protests in Hama itself for the first time since the 1982 massacre.

"The fear barrier has been broken," said one Syrian activist, corresponding with The Sunday Telegraph by email. "We are not scared any more. There is nothing more they can do to us, and it is this knowledge that is our greatest weapon."